BLACK PRESIDENT

FULL DESCRIPTION

Venue

Date

Time

Musgrave 6

22 July 2015

17:00 PM

Musgrave 6

25 July 2015

18:00 PM

AFRICAN PREMIEREBlack President is Kudzi’s personal story, seen from the perspective of another young African artist also battling with themes of identity, displacement, dislocation and significance. Tackling what should be every man's politics: “Where in the world, who in the world and what in the world, am I?”

In Black President, The White Queen (a character from one of Kudzi’s pieces) personifies the idea of an externalised and internalised Quasi Colonialism when she first appears in a work by Kudzanai Chiurai and then steps out of that frame and into the world of the film. She soon goes rogue and irritates everyone around her while trying to buy up every African person and object she sees.

Kudzanai Chiurai’s last hurdle before true freedom is this black guilt is – An ideological militancy adopted perhaps just as a means to access the freedom he needs to truly fly and to find his spirit. His flight however, as is the case for many a young black artist, is often weighed down by guilt, a guilt masquerading as responsibility when it is a demon that must be slayed.

In this film we question the responsibility of African artists in an ever more globalised universe, where we maybe find ourselves "playing catch up" to the West as opposed to following our own paths. Are we victims of our past - forever beholden to our so called arrested development or is our superpower our burden?

DIRECTOR BIOMpumelelo Mcata is perhaps best known as one part of internationally acclaimed South African SAMA award winning band the BLK JKS – although he plays the guitar, self-taught at that, he is quick to remind anyone who will listen that he is not a guitarist but a conduit and artist. Black President is his first feature film.